The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Translation (2017)

Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by frostburg on Thursday August 02, 2018 @11:24AM (#17672132)

Texts have finite length.

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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by yters on Saturday August 04, 2018 @01:28PM (#17687693)

Can you expand the missing premise?

  1. Texts have finite length.
  2. ____
  3. Therefore, the halting problem does not impact machine translation.

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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by frostburg on Monday August 13, 2018 @05:06PM (#17753639)

Sorry, missed this. I'll try to explain. A real computer doesn't actually have an infinite tape (memory) like a canonical Turing Machine, it's actually a finite state machine with a vast amount of possible states that we conveniently think about as analogous to a Turing machine, hence the the halting problem is actually solvable (just not in practice) for real hardware.

Given content that can be expressed in two languages in a text of finite length, you could in theory enumerate all the possible translated texts.

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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by yters on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @12:22PM (#17759289)

If it is not solvable in practice, I don't see how finiteness addresses my objection...

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